I encountered car trouble on the way home eventually resulting in my car dying in my drive, blocking 1/2 of it as an onslaught of costumed 20-somethings were to raid my house. The rain thwarted our initial attempt at diagnosis so we simply opted to push the car out of the way. During break in the rain, my brother dressed as dracula in a too small cape, his friend dresseda post-suicide Lehman Brothers Executive, my dad dressed as the world’s gayest looking pirate at me in my staff uniform dressed as…. an Ockanickon Staff member began pushing. There were two impediments, the fact that the micro-meteorite impact zones of the moon look smooth compared to my driveway and that my dad was convinced that allowing the car to roll downhill would somehow help us push it more. With a mighty heave my car was parked and we were cheered on by Marilyn Monroe (surprisingly helpful) as dreams of driving home inebriated slutty witches died in my chest.
Fat Phone Teasing
While discussing campmaster weekends, Nick Lutz pulled out his phone and the table went silent. It was huge. After several “that’s what she said” joke we began beating on his massive phone. The phone was larger than the three other phones at the table combined and was subject to the following insults.
- Your phone is coal powered.
- Is there a small man in there that runs back and forth around a mini-print shop pulling up letters and putting them on the screen?
- Do you clear the screen by lifting it and shaking it like an Etch-A-Sketch?
- The Soviets called, they want their first phone back.
- It’s not actually a phone, it’s a small factory that generates one-time-use smaller phones.
- What do you do when the nuclear pile inside goes critical?
- Have you ever hid inside of your phone to avoid danger?
- Have you ever had your phone seized at an airport as a weapon?
- Does your phone get power from eating smaller phones?
- Have you ever used it as a surf-board.
- Does your phone have a seperate upper-case and lower case keyboard?
- That phone’s hideous, it’s like having a baby with 60 toes.
- That phone contains a stenographer that writes down everything he says and a small printer to produce the text.
- I picture your phone serving as the Grand Marshall of a Gay Pride Parade, top hat, baton and all.
Did I miss any?
Bee Kicking
Somehow, after setting up for a night in Palmer Lodge, I trapped a bee in my sleeping bag. I left the main room after Nick Gramiccioni began snoring like a 10cc buzzsaw and moved to another room. While walking in, I felt a stinging on the bottom of my bare foot and assumed I stepped on something pointy. I lay down on a WW2 era spring cot and I feel a poking into my belt-area flub, assuming it’s a pointy bit from the down comforter I roll over and realize it’s a bee. There’s a bee in my bed. I start shifting wildly after being stung in the shin I kick the bee against the wall, killing the bee, and making my foot hurt like hell.
So of the four stings, the flub sting is by far the worst. It hit the part of my dunlop that goes over the left side of my best, so it gets aggravated as I walk and shift back and forth. I’m both angry and proud that I nearly smothered a bee to death with my gut.
An Arms Race of Ignorance
For about six years, I’ve asked for “diet cola” as opposed to any sort of brand name of a beverage. It avoid the awkwardness of “I’d like a diet coke”, “is diet pepsi ok?” which I think starts the meal on a negative note and skips the question “do you serve coke or pepsi products” which doesn’t work anyway for those four restaurants that still serve RC cola or Tab. Recently there’s been an uptick in servers who reply to “diet cola” with “is diet (brand name) ok?” Sure, of course it’s fine, you’re probably just verifying that diet pepsi is ok and not making a tacit admission that you hve no clue what a cola is.
In the last three weeks, I have no less than twice been flatly told “we don’t have that” or “no” (to the question “can I have a diet cola”). Then I have to root around for what product line they have and a diet cola of the appropriate type. What’s next? “Can I have some ketchup?”, “no, we only have Heinz” an exchange so ridiculous I’d begin toting my own condiments before having to deal with this. Years from now, when the predictions of Idoicracy comes through sociologists and historians will ask try to find the road-sides to ruin, and in addition to the date that the Slip n’ Slide became an Olympic event (it’s what happens when you melt a louge curve) I will point to the fall of 2008 as the time when servers stopped knowing what cola was.
If anyone wants to go to an ether frollic I’ll be having a phosphate at the drug store reading the new serialized Fitzgerald in Collier’s.
Upstaged
Instructing Engineering merit badge has its emotional highs and lows. One of those moments is when I review the Willow Island catastrophe where 51 workers were killed when improperly engineered scaffolding collapsed. At near the height of this section when I review how the caterpillar scaffolding failed one of the kids pulled a pair of boxers out of his jeans. A F*&#ING PAIR OF BOXERS. He procedes to verify their cleanliness by putting them over his head and puffing up the legs by blowing on them.
My best recovery was using the systems investigations method to figure out what happened. Apparently, when he put his cloths away, he didn’t notice a pair of boxers in his jeans. How do you wear jeans for a day and not notice a ball of cloth somewhere?
Awkward Discoveries
This weekend my house received a bit of an enema as, in concert, the three Robinson men removed nearly the last of my mother’s things. Gone were the cedar chests full of bigenarian clothing with tags and scores of cloth templates for clothing most appropriately sized for the cat. At around 11 PM the last piece was moved from my room by my dad and myself when I learned the first rule of home rearrangement: always clean out underneath any furniture before letting parents move it.
The best “discovery” was a collection of three different lubricants that’d somehow gravitated in the sartorial dustbowl. One was a surgical lubricant I used during my failed attempts at water cooling my PC whose tube was largely taken up by the words “High Performance”. The second vacuum grease which I suppose isn’t a lubricant but looks similar and finally my favorite, the silicone base to keep my treadmill working properly which comes in a non-descript tube simply marked “lube”, like I’d gotten the Safeway brand of KY or purchased it under the rationing of the Gulf War.
In addition, I discovered a backpacking pillow, 3 Scotch Brite sponges, the collected works of Robert W. Service and bag of 25 “Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful ’96” patches.
Bacon Cookies and Quantum Tunneling
A while back, I thought about making bacon chip cookies, and tonight I did. They were quite nice, and I think I’d prepare them when I have curious company or need to fulfill a stereotype. The more interesting part was acquiring the bacon at the Genuardi’s Checkout Line.
Me: Please don’t waste a bag to wrap the bacon separately.
Cashier: You don’t want the bacon touching the other food, do you?
Me: Why not?
Cashier: It’s bacon, it has juices.
Me: So you’re telling me that your store sells leaky bacon?
Cashier: No, but some of the bacon might go through the packaging.
Me: Please, don’t wrap it.
Cashier: Ok, but make sure you cook it just in case something gets in.
I’m confident that the shrink wrapped packaging inspected by the FDA for a meat that’s probably irradiated that I’m going to prepare over a 350° griddle and then crumble up and put into a cookie to be baked at 375° should be sufficiently safe. Should the bacon magically exit the packaging through an aggregate quantum super-position tunneling effect in a process that would normally require millions of times the age of the universe to happen, I’d gladly suffer any intestinal disease to have witnessed a macroscopic manifestation of such quantum wierdness.
If the baconness were to spread, it’s more likely to be stopped by the glass containers of the other ingredients that shared a back with it than by the seran wrap-like condom of a wasted grocery bag. Besides, what what if bacon-ness spread? I don’t see how that’s a bad thing. If bacon held its consistency better I’d use it as a coffee stirrer and in its thicker form a kind of edible fork for things that are scooped like rice or oatmeal.
Uncreative Origami Master
I’ve been folding a lot of drawings. I’ve nearly doubled my throughput in about three weeks of training and I’ve gotten really good at size E drawings which are 16 times a normal sheet of paper. The folding table isn’t big enough to hold the drawing so my first and second folds are negotiated in mid-air and the folds are done with the back of an Expo dry erase eraser.
Today while folding, a group was waiting for someone in a nearby cube to finish a phone call and they started watching. Apparently folding vellum is a lot more hypnotic than I’ve ever found it to be. Later, a coworker returned and started watching, I asked if I could help him, to which he replied “I heard you’re good”.
I’m waiting for some upstart young turk to challenge me for my seat.
Overspecific Ingredient Requirements
During my newly discovered free time, I started baking again. I needed to work my way back in slowly so I started with a chocolate chip cake mix and entered a paroxysmal rage upon seeing the stupidly specific ingredients recommended.
Organic Eggs:Â Normal eggs will cause you to become pregnant if you consume them when mixed with whole wheat flour and sugar sprinkles.
Hershey’s Chocolate: If you don’t make these cookies with our chocolate the cookies will die a horrible death and the Hershey people will mug your sister.
I’d much prefer they did the exact opposite and replaced “3 medium sized eggs” with “375 grams of unfertilized avian ovum” and 1 cup refined sugar with “400 grams of various disaccharides”.
Eat at Joe's
I go through bursts of hating to eat out. It’s a poor value in that I’m essentially paying for a table and for someone to periodically interrupt the conversation. Joe and I changed tack and for $12.00 we enjoyed about two pounds of chicken strips and a pound of tater tots washed down with some swell apple cider.
Driving home with my arm out the car window holding the champagne-like bottle and drinking it at red lights and modifying my route to drive by as many police stations as possible was my attempt at evening entertainment. There just aren’t enough cops out at 10 PM on Tuesdays.